Rogue / Zhentarim Operative / Spellsword

[legionetrangere]

Hi

I'm thinking on building a mix between Rogue/Zhentarim and a investment in Spellsword to get some cool spells (I'm thinking around 10ish spellsword levels)
Any ideas on how this could be done?

[Waldo52]

Dedicated spellcasters really want a lot of levels in their caster class. Even when you pitch something that sounds great like cleric 25 fighter 5, people will chime in with "but your caster level!"

Caster level generally equals the level of your caster (duh) which would be 10 if you only went 10 spellsword. This will effect how hard it is to pierce spell resistance, which is something that almost all characters will have late in the game and is eventually seen on a lot of monsters. CL 10 will also make your buffs easier to remove by abjuration magic, which is another ubiquitous tactic among serious players and later monsters.

To make matters worse, if you do this 10 Spellsowrd/ 20 other classes combo your scrolls will switch to CL 10 as opposed to CL = CHARACTER level after you've cast a spell from your book due to a hard coded feature of Neverwinter Nights. So casting a single spell from your actual list of class spells ruins perfectly good scrolls that would otherwise outperform any spells you have in your spellbook!

Some caster classes can in fact multiclass well, but those tend to be full AB classes like ranger and paladin which have good features outside of casting. I would personally love to find out that there's a reason to multiclass spellsword, if only because they have cool looking abilities. But from what I've seen, it's a class that does best with 27-30 levels of investment or none at all.

Arelith doesn't support the "magical rogue" archetype well, but there are some ways to go about what you're trying to do.

1) Play a warlock. They're very roguish and stealthy. They can even take a hexblade dip and get some synergies + trap use.

2) Play an invisible blade. They mix well with rogue like classes and have a slightly magical feel because they can strip buffs off an enemy in a magical fashion.

3) Play 27 spellsword/3 invisible blade, rogue or assassin. This is PROBABLY not as good as a pure spellsword but should still bw excellent. You'll have AC on the higher side, okayish damage and a lot of spellsword spells like invisibility to supplement your stealth.

4) Play a hexblade 5-6, rogue 24-25. Modify with assassin or Zent levels to your preference.
This is slightly weaker than the fighter and invisible blade multiclass, but still reasonably effective. This is what I do. You get an incredibly weak familiar that can be useful for scouting and not putting your neck out (or just for fun RP) and you get a weak hex ability. This is actually pretty good because it's cast as an instant action and lowers enemy AC by one.

5) Use scrolls, wands, etc. This should actually have been number one. Some people go for a golden number, I think it's 80 lore? This will allow you to cast ninth level spells in scroll form. Roguish characters that do this can be a lot of fun and blur the line between caster and martial character.